Betting on Darwin

Doc: What's your role in the
browser conversation now, with Mozilla.org?

Tom: We're hoping to steward
that conversation, but there's no compulsion here. They have the
source and can choose to go their merry way. We're all better off
if there's a lot of coordination and cooperation, and the community
recognizes that. So it's not that they're going to be dragged
kicking and screaming into it. We don't have to offer free donuts
to get them to come to the party. On the other hand, if they don't
like our stewardship, they don't have to cooperate. So we have to
act in the traditional open source responsible manner—in a way
that will make them want to play. Somebody will steward this,
whether it's us or not. If they don't like us, they'll find someone
else to do it.

Marc: Again, we can't
de-commit.

Doc: I've always thought the
best kind of marketing amounts to arson. You set fires and stand
back and watch what happens.

Marc: (Laughing) Right. I'll
enjoy watching this one.

Doc: The open source world,
it seems to me, is already a very active conversation. Great
kindling, as it were. Already the browser conversation has changed:
Whoosh, it's different.

Marc: Right.

Doc: Yet the press will
still play this as a war over a battlefield, no matter how much it
looks like the Big Bang, and no matter how non-territorial it
is.

Marc: Exactly. What's really
happening is new vendors constantly opening up new spaces where new
things happen. Everybody gains. That's the real story.

Doc: And, once you have a
firestorm of interest going on around Mozilla, it will do what LDAP
did two years ago.

Marc: Sure. Same
pattern.

No Surprises

Doc: What has surprised you,
in just the week since the source went out?

Marc: A lot of
our programmers have been surprised by the
level of interest and activity. We've cured a lot of skepticism in
the last week.

Tom: You're going to dislike
the things that surprised me, because in truth we expected this to
take off in exactly the way it has. We got a bunch of memory bug
fixes that I thought were great. I was a little surprised at how
strong the Macintosh community jumped on. They were really in
there. We got a localized version that happened fast: a crypto
plug-in from the crypto-weenies in Australia who hacked it together
in seven hours hacking time, fifteen hours real time. Speed was
impressive too. I expected people to spend more time digesting, but
they piled right in.

The skeptics are surprised, of course. “Well, gee, we see
some evidence here that Netscape is serious about this and not
abandoning the browser business.” That kind
of stuff is what's truly surprising.

Marc: There was skepticism
in engineering as to whether people would be able to understand it
enough to make changes. And they've absolutely been able to do so.
It hasn't been an issue.

Tom: Yeah, the difficulties
haven't been difficult.

Hand in Claw

Doc: Marc, you said at the
SVLUG meeting that you could see Mozilla becoming the GUI for
Linux. What are you talking about there?

Marc: I don't want to
overreach and say Mozilla has to be the GUI
for Linux. It makes perfect sense for Mozilla to be in a window
running on an X desktop or anywhere else. But the thing we think is
happening—and has been steadily happening over the last five
years—is that we are all spending more and more of our time doing
things on the Net as opposed to doing things on the local system.
That should lead to a major interface change we're only beginning
to see, equivalent to the shift from text to GUI.

The next shift should be from a GUI-centric or
desktop-centered interface to a net-centered interface, one that
takes into account the virtues of the network. Because the
fundamental difference is that there's a million or a billion times
as much stuff out there that we have access to and therefore may
have to deal with at some level, than was ever on an individual
desktop system. And so, the interface has to change radically to
whatever the Net opens up. The scope of that means Mozilla is
positioned to become that GUI, that breakthrough, through community
effort.

Doc: The network
interface?

Marc: Exactly, the network
interface. If you think of Mozilla as a full-screen environment
that is inherently a network interface, it is heavily oriented to
filtering and managing the huge amount of information out there,
and being extraordinarily personalized for the individual user.
There are all these resources to draw out of the Net, which
increasingly represent the needs of the user to the Net; thus,
resources become smarter in a sense, doing more useful stuff for
the user, and finally will, no doubt, include the contents of the
user's own machine.

Doc: So your local machine
becomes a subset of what's in the networked universe, but your view
is through a Net-oriented interface.

Marc: Exactly. The local box
is a very, very small subset, but the Net is the context.

Doc: We already see people
adapting the way they work to the Net context.

Marc: Now, we see lots of
documents, reports and messages are being typed in e-mail that
previously would have been typed in a word processor or on a
typewriter. You see the emergence of the navigation center in the
code that's up there now, providing a view of the Net. Maps of web
sites, plus bookmarks, plus directories, plus e-mail
messages—basically everything you have access to, in a single
place.

I can easily imagine Mozilla, within a year or two or even
sooner, will have an interface mode that gives you sort of a
full-screen experience that happens to provide everything you need
to manage your local desktop but is specifically focused on being a
very effective interface for the Net. This is going to be a very
fertile breeding ground for a lot of innovation in user interfaces.
There has been a huge amount of work in computer science labs and
in the larger community on next generation user interfaces.
Historically, it has taken decades for any of those innovations to
make it out. Windows and the Macintosh are known for technologies
invented 25 years ago. But while it takes a long time for this to
happen in the commercial marketplace, it can happen much faster in
the grass roots world that will grow around Mozilla. You will see
grad students doing radically advanced user interfaces as their
Ph.D. theses, implemented in Mozilla. One of those will be the
interface we'll all be using a few years from now.

Doc: I have this notion that
who you are is more a matter of where you come from than any other
factor. It's the anchor point for the vector of your life. You can
change your name, your job, your whole résumé, but
you still come from the same place. And this is true of companies
as well as people. It's the source of character. Apple will always
come from Steve Jobs' aesthetic. Sun will always come from The
Network. Netscape will always come from wherever you, Marc, were at
when your team created Mosaic. Was that UNIX?

Marc: There were UNIX guys,
but a lot of PC and Macintosh guys as well. Essentially, where we
came from was a commitment to a heterogeneous universe. We also go
back a long way with this. We had connections in the open source
community before Linux really existed. Back then, the open source
community was a lot smaller. The projects they were focused on were
things like Emacs, FreeBSD, C compilers and so on. Now that
community is larger, more involved with the Web and growing very
fast. That's why the timing is so right for this move. It wouldn't
have been a few years ago.

Social Computing

Doc: A
while back it seemed to me that the next stage beyond personal
computing would be social computing. It seemed a natural
progression, from the one to the many. But there is a difference in
kind between the personal and the social, between the user
interface to a personal computer and the user interface to the Net,
which is where we find computing's society. What you're talking
about is making Mozilla a social interface.

Marc: Right.

Doc: Maybe it's a stretch,
but the Open Source society is very different than the company
that's trying to build the ultimate personal computer.

Marc: Right. Microsoft is
trying to put all this stuff back in the box, right? They're trying
to take this whole world and squeeze it down.

Doc: If I look for analogous
concerns in the real world, my most personal space is maybe my
closet, because I know where my shoes are, and my shirts and belts
and so forth.

Marc: Same for your
bookshelf.

Doc:
Yet, society is nothing like my closet or my bookshelf. But the
presence of a computing society in my life means I don't write in a
word processor anymore. I write in e-mail and a text editor. I
wrote my questions today in BBEdit, saved it to the a42 server at
Linux Journal in Seattle, reviewed them with Phil Hughes, wherever
he was, and printed it out in my office. The browser was there for
all of it, of course. And the interesting thing is that all this is
far less feature-rich than what I used to do on a word processor
and print out at home. But it's far more social, and far more
useful.

Marc: It's social
publishing.

Doc: Right. Now, here's
where I'm going with this: we are each willing to yield a lot of
personal choice to get along with society. Hey, maybe I like to
race cars, but I won't do that on a highway. But I behave the way I
do on a highway because that's a social place.

Tom: That's incredibly true
of your social life. All of your manners are necessary to get along
in society.

Doc: The irony of personal
computing is that you can't see the social from the personal. I
can't abstract the organization of the world from the contents of
my closet. I can't understand traffic from the perspective of
racing a car. I can't see more in terms of less. Yet there are
concerns and functions inherent in social computing that don't show
up in personal computing. What I'm suggesting is that you guys live
at the social level and have lived there all along.

Marc: That's right.

Doc: So you're coming from
the social, and Microsoft is coming from the personal. Which is why
I think you're not surprised, Tom, when the society you know best
acts just as you expected when you released the source code.

Tom: Right. And somebody who
lived in the other world might be asking all these questions about,
“Why would these people want to help you?”

Marc: Or “Why isn't this
just going to fragment?” That was the big question we got from the
press, and we had to carefully explain why there are tons of
reasons it won't fragment, not the least of which is the
centrifugal force where, if you want to fragment, you take upon
yourself the burden of pulling in all the changes everyone else is
making into your own version. There are always issues like this
that actually make things work. That's why Linux works.

Tom: Who wants
incompatibility? The problem is, I could say this to a room full of
people and they'd all have the same answer. The guys up north want
to sell tools that are the only tools in the business that can
operate on the data... Then I say “Ah, okay, sorry, I wasn't
thinking about that. I think compatibility and open interfaces are
good things.” So we don't communicate because we're not operating
at the same level.